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''Removing the Perpetuity of Hatred'': on South Africa As a Model Example

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''Removing the Perpetuity of Hatred'': on South Africa As a Model Example Volume 88 Number 862 June 2006 ‘‘Removing the perpetuity of hatred’’: on South Africa as a model example Barbara Cassin Barbara Cassin is research director in philology and philosophy at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris (CNRS) Abstract Based on the example of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the author analyses the conditions necessary from a philosophical and philological perspective — even if they are never enough — to move from war to reconciliation, and thus to deal with hatred: a policy of remembrance, a policy of justice and a policy of speech. Introduction Two quotes will help in siting my remarks. The first, by Plutarch, comments on a law of Solon, which forbade anyone to speak ill of the dead: ‘‘It is politic to remove the perpetuity of hatred’’ (Life of Solon, 21). The second is the graffiti on the wall of Desmond Tutu’s house in Cape Town: ‘‘How to turn human wrongs into human rights.’’ The first is considered by Nicole Loraux, for example, as a reflection on the first amnesty decree recorded in history, the decree that brought the Athenian civil war to an end in 403 BC after the tyranny of the Thirty. The second describes what is taking place in South Africa’s fraternal revolution, thanks in particular to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). This analogy indicates how a work on Greek rhetoric, politics and sophistry can show the way to a better understanding of what is happening today. The TRC was established to help South Africa avoid the blood bath expected at the end of apartheid and to promote what Tutu calls ‘‘the miracle of 235 B. Cassin – ‘‘Removing the perpetuity of hatred’’: on South Africa as a model example the negotiated settlement’’ while contributing to the creation of a new nation of ‘‘rainbow people’’. The distance to be covered can be gauged from two texts: the Population Registration Act of 1950 — the law that was the foundation of apartheid — and the postscript to the 1993 Interim Constitution. Here is the first text, signed in actual fact by the King of England. Its convolutions give food for thought: ‘‘On behalf of His Most Excellent Majesty the King, the Senate of the Assembly of the Union of South Africa, it is hereby promulgated that: 1. … (iii) A ‘‘coloured’’ is a person who is neither white nor native. … (x) A ‘‘native’’ is a person who is, or who is generally accepted as, a member of any aboriginal race or tribe of Africa. ... (xv) A ‘‘white person’’ is one who is in appearance obviously white or who is generally accepted as white, excluding any person who, although in appearance obviously white, is commonly accepted as coloured … 5. … (2) The Governor General can, by proclamation in the Gazette, prescribe and define the ethnic or other groups in which coloureds and natives shall be classed.’’ And here is the second, the 1993 sunset clauses that form the birth certificate of the TRC: ‘‘This Constitution provides a historic bridge between the past of a deeply divided society characterized by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful co-existence and development opportunities for all South Africans, irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex. The pursuit of national unity, the well-being of all South African citizens and peace require reconciliation between the people of South Africa and the reconstruction of society. The adoption of this Constitution lays the secure foundation for the people of South Africa to transcend the divisions and strife of the past, which generated gross violations of human rights, the transgression of humanitarian principles in violent conflicts and a legacy of hatred, fear, guilt and revenge. These can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu1 but not for victimization. In order to advance such reconciliation and reconstruction, amnesty shall be granted in respect of acts, omissions and offences associated with political objectives and committed in the course of the conflicts of the past … 1‘‘Ubuntu’’ is a term that belongs to the field of Bantu languages, rendered very broadly by the English term ‘‘fellowship’’; it is used without translation in the eleven versions of the Constitution corresponding to the eleven national languages. It denotes the ‘‘quality inherent in the fact of being a person with other persons,’’ and Antje Krog comments on it as follows in Country of My Skull, Random House, Johannesburg, 1998: ‘‘We are, therefore I am.’’ 236 Volume 88 Number 862 June 2006 With this Constitution and these commitments we, the people of South Africa, open a new chapter in the history of our country. May God bless our country.’’ Apartheid, which the United Nations declared a crime against humanity in 1973, was abolished twenty years later, in 1993, a year before Mandela’s election. It was the TRC that made it possible to ‘‘amnesty apartheid,’’ the stark term chosen by Philippe-Joseph Salazar.2 From this perspective, three conditions seem necessary — even if they are never enough — in order to move from war to reconciliation and thus to deal with hatred: a policy of remembrance, a policy of justice and a policy of speech. A policy of remembrance I propose to make a distinction between two policies of remembrance that are quite separate but can be combined. The first is the passive policy of keeping archives. Appeasement is entrusted to time. A period of abeyance fosters transition from an all too recent, fiery and highly emotive past — the past of the combatant, citizen, resistance fighter or collaborator — to a past that has cooled down, a subject for study by historians and specialists. Just as World War II, for instance, is now coming back to us in France as a history lesson. The second is an active policy, which can be a policy of amnesia or of anamnesis. First, the Athenian decree of 403, the decree of amnesty, was in fact a decree of forgetfulness (in ancient Greek ‘‘amnesty’’ and ‘‘amnesia’’ are the same words). It is an injunction: meˆ mneˆsikakein — ‘‘thou shalt not remember the misfortunes, or the wrongs, of past events.’’ And the first person who tried to ‘‘recollect’’ — albeit on the stage of a theatre — was indeed put to death. But the fact is that everyone knew about the brief and terrible past, the civil war that had lasted for nine months and had killed 1,500 citizens (a considerable proportion of the population). It is, mutatis mutandis, the policy pursued in Algeria today, as shown in the Libe´ration headline of 10 March 2006, ‘‘Alge´rie, l’amnistie et l’amne´sie,’’ where the relevant article explains that the law makes a provision for ‘‘a heavy penalty’’ against anyone who refers to the national tragedy. Anamnesis, on the other hand, is quite the opposite, reflecting the TRC’s mandatory requirement of full disclosure. In this case, everything must be recalled and told, because, unlike the situation in Athens, it is known that nothing, or virtually nothing is known and that it is imperative to know. Apartheid continued for thirty years, and all of the archives were destroyed. It had not been a short war but a lasting crime against humanity. It was not a matter of forgetting in order to 2 Amnistier l’apartheid, Travaux de la Commission Ve´rite´ et Re´conciliation, Ph.-J. Salazar, ed., Paris, Le Seuil, 2004. My quotations are drawn from Desmond Tutu’s Report as cited in that [bilingual] publication. 237 B. Cassin – ‘‘Removing the perpetuity of hatred’’: on South Africa as a model example continue to live with one’s fellow citizens as in the past. Instead, it was about constructing a common past in order to form a community that did not yet exist, that of the ‘‘rainbow people’’. Nor was it a matter of writing history as a historian but of obtaining ‘‘enough of the truth,’’ as the report puts it (I, 70), to live together. In either case, amnesia or anamnesis is a construct in which, as Aristotle points out in the Constitution of Athens (40), misfortune can be used politically as the starting point for consensus — a fine anticipation of turning human wrongs into human rights. A policy of justice The choice of amnesty is obviously linked to those ‘‘crimes which can be neither punished nor forgiven’’ (the title of a work by Antoine Garapon, who himself used a phrase coined by Hannah Arendt). It is thus linked to a policy of justice. Both in Athens and in South Africa the choice was made to stand back from a punitive, retributive form of justice, which is the norm, in favour of a justice of exception — a new form of justice termed ‘‘transitional’’ but to be understood as strongly positive, much in the sense where Protagoras speaks, for example, of ‘‘changing from a worse to a better condition’’ (Plato, Theaetetus, 167 a). It is also referred to as ‘‘restorative’’ in that it restores the community and should even be called ‘‘creative’’ in the case of the TRC, because it brought the new community of a rainbow nation into being. I would like to dwell for a moment on the singularities of the TRC, set up by the sunset clauses that incorporated it into the constitution and shield it from any subsequent interference by an international court. The room for manoeuvre to avoid the ‘‘blood bath that virtually everyone predicted,’’ as Desmond Tutu wrote in his foreword to the final report, was very narrow and depended on what the Greeks called kairos: the choice of the right moment.
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